Many Internet-based or web-based social networks are powerful tools to connect people separated by potentially vast distances. Social networks currently allow users to build a user profile and connect to friends whom the user may or may not already know from other social means. Some existing social networks, particularly dating websites, offer suggestions to their users for possible matches with other users. Typically, these matches are suggested based on characteristics provided in the user profiles.
User matching found in existing web-based social networks, however, suffer from the fact that they rely on user self-reported data to build a user profile. For example, dating websites typically provide surveys for their users to fill out. The surveyed users are then matched with suggested counterparts based on the survey data. With user profiles strictly reliant on self-reported data, users can easily provide an inaccurate portrayal of themselves. In other words, users are likely to game the system to attempt to look better or different than their actual selves. Since users are matched based on their profiles, inaccurate user profiles would naturally lead to improper or imperfect matches.
Furthermore, the user surveys provided by existing social networks typically ask the users to answer direct questions related to a particular subject. Therefore, the surveys are only relevant to one or a small number of topics or subjects and can be completely useless for user profiling with respect to other topics. In this scenario, additional user surveys may be required when the social network attempts to match users for other purposes. The additional surveys would be an annoyance to the users of the social network. For the example of dating websites, the user surveys generally contain questions related to particular romantic interests of the user. Though these questions may be relevant to dating, they may be completely irrelevant for another purpose, such as a community service event.
The present invention addresses at least the difficult problems of user profiling and profile matching.